The kingdom was centred on the valley of the River Trent and its tributaries, in the region now known as the English Midlands.[1] The kingdom's "capital" was the town of Tamworth, which was the seat of the Mercian Kings from at least around AD 584, when King Creoda built a fortress at the town.

For 300 years (between AD 600 and 900), having annexed or gained submissions from five of the other six kingdoms of the Heptarchy (East Anglia, Essex, Kent, Sussex and Wessex), Mercia dominated England south of the River Humber: this period is known as the Mercian Supremacy. The reign of King Offa, who is best remembered for his Dyke which designated the boundary between Mercia and the Welsh kingdoms, is sometimes known as the "Golden Age of Mercia". Nicholas Brooks noted that "the Mercians stand out as by far the most successful of the various early Anglo-Saxon peoples until the later ninth century",[2] and some historians, such as Sir Frank Stenton, believe the unification of England south of the Humber estuary was achieved during the reign of Offa.[3]

Mercia was originally a pagan kingdom, but King Peada converted to Christianity around 656, with Christianity firmly established in the kingdom by the late 7th century. The Diocese of Mercia was founded in 656, with the first bishop, Diuma, based at Repton. After only 13 years at Repton, in 669 the fifth bishop, Saint Chad, moved the bishopric to Lichfield, where it has been based ever since. In 691 the Diocese of Mercia became the Diocese of Lichfield. For a brief period between 787 to 799 the diocese was an archbishopric, although it was officially dissolved in 803. The current bishop, Jonathan Gledhill, is the 98th since the diocese was established.

At the end of the 9th century, following the invasions of the Vikings and their Great Heathen Army, much of the former Mercian territory was absorbed into the Danelaw. At its height the Danelaw included London, all of East Anglia and most of the North of England.

The final Mercian king, Ceolwulf II, died in 879; the kingdom appears to have thereby lost its political independence. Initially it was ruled by a lord or ealdorman under the overlordship of Alfred The Great, who styled himself "King of the Anglo-Saxons". The kingdom had a brief period of independence in the mid-10th century, and in 1016 it became part of the Kingdom of England ruled by King Canute (Cnut the Great).

Mercia is still used as a geographic designation, and the name is used by wide range of organisations, including military units, public, commercial and voluntary bodies.

Mercia's exact evolution at the start of the Anglo-Saxon era remains more obscure than that of Northumbria, Kent, or even Wessex. Mercia developed an effective political structure and adopted Christianity later than the other kingdoms.[4] Archaeological surveys show that Angles settled the lands north of the River Thames by the 6th century. The name "Mercia" is Old English for "boundary folk" (see Welsh Marches), and the traditional interpretation is that the kingdom originated along the frontier between the native Welsh and the Anglo-Saxon invaders. However, P. Hunter Blair argued an alternative interpretation: that they emerged along the frontier between Northumbria and the inhabitants of the Trent river valley.

The earliest person named in any records as a king of Mercia is Creoda, said to have been the great-grandson of Icel. Coming to power around 584, he built a fortress at Tamworth[citation needed] which became the seat of Mercia's kings. His son Pybba succeeded him in 593. Cearl, a kinsman of Creoda, followed Pybba in 606; in 615, Cearl gave his daughter Cwenburga in marriage to Edwin, king of Deira, whom he had sheltered while he was an exiled prince.

The next Mercian king was Penda, who ruled from about 626 or 633 until 655. Some of what is known about Penda comes from the hostile account of Bede, who disliked him both for being an enemy to Bede's own Northumbria and for being a pagan. However, Bede admits that it was Penda who freely allowed Christianmissionaries from Lindisfarne into Mercia, and did not restrain them from preaching. Edwin, who had become not only ruler of the newly unified Northumbria, but bretwalda, or high king, over the southern kingdoms, was defeated and killed by Penda and his ally Cadwallon of Gwynedd in 633. When another Northumbrian king, Oswald, arose and again claimed overlordship of the south, he also was defeated and killed by Penda and his allies in 642 at the Battle of Maserfield. In 655, after a period of confusion in Northumbria, Penda brought 30 sub-kings to fight the new Northumbrian king Oswiu at the Battle of Winwaed, in which Penda in turn lost the battle and his life.[8]

The battle led to a temporary collapse of Mercian power. Penda was succeeded by his son Peada, who converted to Christianity at Repton in 653, and who was set up by Oswiu as an under-king; but in the spring of 656 he was murdered and Oswiu assumed direct control of the whole of Mercia. A revolt in 658 threw off Northumbrian domination and resulted in the appearance of another son of Penda, Wulfhere, who ruled Mercia as an independent kingdom (though he apparently continued to render tribute to Northumbria for a while) until his death in 675. Wulfhere was initially successful in restoring the power of Mercia, but the end of his reign saw a serious defeat by Northumbria. The next king, Æthelred defeated Northumbria in the Battle of the Trent in 679, settling once and for all the long-disputed control of the former kingdom of Lindsey. Æthelred was succeeded by Cœnred son of Wulfhere, and both these kings are better known for their religious activities than anything else; but the king who succeeded them in 709, Ceolred, is said in a letter of Saint Boniface to have been a dissolute youth who died insane. So ended the rule of the direct descendants of Penda.[4]

At some point before the accession of Æthelbald, the Mercians conquered the region around Wroxeter, known to the Welsh as Pengwern or "The Paradise of Powys". Elegies written in the persona of its dispossessed rulers record the sorrow at this loss.

A series of maps that illustrate the increasing hegemony of Mercia during the 8th century

The next important king of Mercia was Æthelbald (716–757). For the first few years of his reign he had to face two strong rival kings, Wihtred of Kent and Ine of Wessex. But when Wihtred died in 725, and Ine abdicated in 726 to become a monk in Rome, Æthelbald was free to establish Mercia's hegemony over the rest of the Anglo-Saxons south of the Humber. Æthelbald suffered a setback in 752, when he was defeated by the West Saxons under Cuthred, but he seems to have restored his supremacy over Wessex by 757.

In July 2009, the Staffordshire Hoard of Anglo-Saxon gold was discovered in a field near Lichfield in Staffordshire. Lichfield was the religious centre of Mercia. The artefacts have tentatively been dated to around AD 600–800. Whether the hoard was deposited by Anglo-Saxon pagans or Christians is debated, as is the purpose of the deposit.[9]

After the murder of Æthelbald by one of his bodyguards in 757, a civil war broke out which was concluded with the victory of Offa. Offa was forced to build anew the hegemony over the southern English of his predecessor, and he did this so successfully that he became the greatest king Mercia had ever known. Not only did he win battles and dominate Southern England but also he took an active hand in administering the affairs of his kingdom by founding market towns and overseeing the first major issues of gold coins in Britain; he assumed a role in the administration of the Catholic Church in England (sponsoring the short-lived archbishopric of Lichfield), and even negotiated with Charlemagne as an equal. Offa is credited with the construction of Offa's Dyke, marking the border between Wales and Mercia.

Offa exerted himself to ensure that his son Ecgfrith of Mercia would succeed him, but after his death in July 796, Ecgfrith survived for only five more months, and the kingdom passed to a distant relative named Coenwulf in December 796. In 821, Coenwulf was succeeded by his brother Ceolwulf, who demonstrated his military prowess by his attack on and destruction of the fortress of Deganwy in Gwynedd. The power of the West Saxons under Egbert was rising during this period, however, and in 825 Egbert defeated the Mercian king Beornwulf (who had overthrown Ceolwulf in 823) at Ellendun.

The Battle of Ellendun proved decisive. Beornwulf was slain suppressing a revolt amongst the East Angles, and his successor, a former ealdorman named Ludeca, met the same fate. Another ealdorman, Wiglaf, subsequently ruled for less than two years before being driven out of Mercia by Egbert. In 830, Wiglaf regained independence for Mercia, but by this time Wessex was clearly the dominant power in England. Wiglaf was succeeded by Beorhtwulf.

In 852, Burgred came to the throne and with Ethelwulf of Wessex subjugated North Wales. In 868, Viking invaders (from Denmark) occupied Nottingham. The Vikings drove Burgred from his kingdom in 874 and Ceolwulf II took his place. In 877 the Vikings seized the eastern part of Mercia, which became part of the Danelaw.[11] Ceolwulf, the last king of Mercia, was left with the western half, and he reigned until 879.[12] From about 883 until 911 Æthelred, Lord of the Mercians ruled Mercia under the overlordship of Wessex. All coins struck in Mercia after the disappearance of Ceolwulf in c.879 were in the name of the West Saxon king.[13] Æthelred had married Æthelflæd, daughter of Alfred the Great of Wessex, and she assumed power when her husband became ill at some time in the last ten years of his life.[14]

After Æthelred's death 911 Æthelflæd ruled as ‘Lady of the Mercians’ but Edward took control of London and Oxford, which Alfred had placed under Æthelred's control. She and her brother continued Alfred's policy of building fortified burhs, and in 917-18 they were able to conquer the southern Danelaw in East Anglia and Danish Mercia.[14]

When Æthelflæd died in 918, Ælfwynn, her daughter by Æthelred, succeeded as 'Second Lady of the Mercians', but within six months Edward had deprived her of all authority in Mercia and taken her into Wessex.[14]

References to Mercia and the Mercians continue through the annals recording the reigns of Æthelstan and his successors. Æthelstan himself was raised in Mercia and became its king before he was king of Wessex. In Winchester there was even an attempt to blind Æthelstan as he was seen as an outsider. In 975 King Edgar is described as “friend of the West Saxons and protector of the Mercians”.

A separate political existence from Wessex was briefly restored in 955–959, when Edgar became king of Mercia, and again in 1016, when the kingdom was divided between Cnut and Edmund Ironside, Cnut taking Mercia.

The last reference to Mercia by name is in the annal for 1017, when Eadric Streona was awarded the government of Mercia by Cnut. The later earls, Leofric, Ælfgar and Edwin, ruled over a territory broadly corresponding to historic Mercia, but the Chronicle does not identify it by name. The Mercians as a people are last mentioned in the annal for 1049.

The dialect thrived between the 8th and 13th centuries and was referred to by John Trevisa, writing in 1387:[15]

For men of the est with men of the west, as it were undir the same partie of hevene, acordeth more in sownynge of speche than men of the north with men of the south, therfore it is that Mercii, that beeth men of myddel Engelond, as it were parteners of the endes, understondeth better the side langages, northerne and southerne, than northerne and southerne understondeth either other...

J. R. R. Tolkien is one of many scholars who have studied and promoted the Mercian dialect of Old English, and introduced various Mercian terms into his legendarium – especially in relation to the Kingdom of Rohan, otherwise known as the Mark (a name cognate with Mercia). Not only is the language of Rohan actually represented as[16] the Mercian dialect of Old English, but a number of its kings are given the same names as monarchs who appear in the Mercian royal genealogy, e.g. Fréawine, Fréaláf and Éomer (see List of kings of the Angles).[17]

The first kings of Mercia were pagans, and they resisted the encroachment of Christianity longer than other kingdoms in the Anglo-Saxon Heptarchy.

Mercian rulers remained resolutely pagan until the reign of Peada in 656, although this did not prevent them joining coalitions with Christian Welsh rulers to resist Northumbria. The first appearance of Christianity in Mercia, however, had come at least thirty years earlier, following the Battle of Cirencester of 628, when Penda incorporated the formerly West Saxon territories of Hwicce into his kingdom.

The conversion of Mercia to Christianity occurred in the latter part of the 7th century, and by the time of Penda's defeat and death, Mercia was largely surrounded by Christian states. Diuma, an Irish monk and one of Oswiu's missionaries was subsequently ordained a bishop – the first to operate in Mercia. Christianity finally gained a foothold in Mercia when Oswiu supported Peada as sub-king of the Middle Angles, requiring him to marry Oswiu's daughter, Alchflaed, and to accept her religion.[18]

Decisive steps to Christianise Mercia were taken by Chad (Latinised by Bede as Ceadda), the fifth[19] bishop to operate in Mercia. This controversial figure was given land by King Wulfhere to build a monastery at Lichfield. As in other Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, the many small monasteries established by the Mercian kings allowed the political/military and ecclesiastical leadership to consolidate their unity through bonds of kinship.[20]

For knowledge of the internal composition of the Kingdom of Mercia, we must rely on a document of uncertain age (possibly late 7th century), known as the Tribal Hidage – an assessment of the extent (but not the location) of land owned (reckoned in hides), and therefore the military obligations and perhaps taxes due, by each of the Mercian tribes and subject kingdoms by name. This hidage exists in several manuscript versions, some as late as the 14th century. It lists a number of peoples, such as the Hwicce, who have now vanished, except for reminders in various placenames. The major subdivisions of Mercia were as follows:[22]

A people of the Welsh border, also known as the Westerna, under Mercian control from the 7th century. Smaller folk groups within included the Temersæte near Hereford and the Hahlsæte near Ludlow (approx. Herefs. & S. Shrops.).

A people of the Welsh border under Mercian control from the 7th century. Smaller folk groups within included the Rhiwsæte near Wroxeter and the Meresæte near Chester (approx. N. Shrops., Flints. & Cheshire).

Taken over from Essex in the 8th century, including London (approx. Middlesex).

After Mercia was annexed by Wessex in the early 10th century, the West Saxon rulers divided it into shires modelled after their own system, cutting across traditional Mercian divisions. These shires survived mostly intact until 1974, and even today still largely follow their original boundaries.

The Kingdom of Mercia predated the emergence of heraldry, so there is no authentic Mercian heraldic device. However, later generations have ascribed a variety of devices to the rulers of Mercia or to the land itself.

The saltire as a symbol of Mercia may have been in use since the time of King Offa.[23] By the 13th century, the saltire had become the attributed arms of the Kingdom of Mercia.[24] The arms are blazonedAzure, a saltire Or, meaning a gold (or yellow) saltire on a blue field. The arms were subsequently used by the Abbey of St Albans, founded by King Offa of Mercia. With the dissolution of the Abbey and the incorporation of the borough of St Albans the device was used on the town's corporate seal and was officially recorded as the arms of the town at an heraldic visitation in 1634.[25]

The silver double-headed eagle surmounted by a golden three-pronged Saxon crown has been used by several units of the British Army as a heraldic device for Mercia since 1958. It is derived from the attributed arms of Leofric, Earl of Mercia in the 11th century.[26] It is worth noting, however, that Leofric is sometimes attributed a black, single-headed eagle instead.[27] The example on the left is the official device of the Mercian Regiment.

The wyvern, a dragon with two legs, has a dubious association with Mercia.

Midland Railway, who used a silver (white) wyvern as their crest, having inherited the symbol from the Leicester and Swannington Railway, asserted that the "wyvern was the standard of the Kingdom of Mercia", and that it was "a quartering in the town arms of Leicester".[28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35] However, in 1897 the Railway Magazine noted that there appeared "to be no foundation that the wyvern was associated with the Kingdom of Mercia".[33]

The ultimate source for the symbolism of white dragons in England would appear to be Geoffrey of Monmouth’s fictional History of the Kings of Britain (c. 1136), where an incident occurs in the life of Merlin in which a red dragon is seen fighting a white dragon which it overcomes. The red dragon was taken to represent the Welsh and their eventual victory over the Anglo-Saxon invaders, symbolised by the white dragon. However, there is no archaeological or artefactual evidence that the early Anglo-Saxons used a white dragon to represent themselves.[citation needed]

The cap badge of the 2nd Mercian Battalion of the Territorial Army in the 1980s was a wyvern.[citation needed]

It has been suggested that the Middle Kingdom in J. R. R. Tolkien's Farmer Giles of Ham is based on Mercia,[36] and indeed the story is dominated by a dragon. However this dragon becomes the symbol of the Little Kingdom (an autonomous part of the Middle Kingdom) rather than the Middle Kingdom as a whole.

The term 'midlands' is first recorded (as 'mydlande') in 1555.[37] It is possible, therefore, that until then Mercia had remained the preferred term, as the quote from Trevisa above would indicate.

John Bateman, writing in 1876 or 1883, referred to contemporary Cheshire and Staffordshire landholdings as being in Mercia.[38] The most credible source for the idea of a contemporary Mercia is Thomas Hardy's Wessex novels. The first of these appeared in 1874 and Hardy himself considered it the origin of the conceit of a contemporary Wessex. Bram Stoker set his 1911 novel, The Lair of the White Worm, in a contemporary Mercia that may have been influenced by Hardy, whose secretary was a friend of Stoker's brother. Although 'Edwardian Mercia' never had the success of 'Victorian Wessex', it was an idea that appealed to the higher echelons of society. In 1908 Sir Oliver Lodge, Principal of Birmingham University, wrote to his counterpart at Bristol, welcoming a new university worthy of:

"...the great Province of Wessex whose higher educational needs it will supply. It will be no rival, but colleague and co-worker with this university, whose province is Mercia...".[39] At this period, prior to the First World War, regional identities within England were being debated with the prospect of separate Home Rule parliaments being established.

Telephone directories across the Midlands reveal a large number of commercial and voluntary organisations using 'Mercia' in their names. In the early 1980s, Mercia Television was an unsuccessful contender for the Midlands franchise, then owned by ATV. It was won by Central Independent Television. Mercia (formerly Mercia FM) is a commercial radio station broadcasting from Coventry founded in 1980 as Mercia Sound.

Sovereign Mercia, a contemporary neopagan organisation based in Birmingham, campaigns for Mercian independence as a modern, technological state.[42] Another group, the Acting Witan of Mercia, advocates a return to an agrarian subsistence economy within a federation of English regions.[43]

Margaret Gelling. 'The Early History of Western Mercia'. (p. 184–201; In: The Origins of the Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms. S. Bassett. 1989) (Western Mercia and the upper Trent being the probable cradle of early Mercia).

Simon Schama. A History of Britain: At the Edge of the World? – 3000 BC–AD 1603 Vol 1 BBC Books 2003